As CTO of Intraway, Matias Torchinsky must ensure the company is on the cutting edge of technology trends to support the service of over 40 million subscribers. He found that company needn't "reinvent the wheel" by designing its own APIs. In this interview he explains the value of TM Forum's Open APIs in the company's automation efforts.
Tell us about yourself and your job As Intraway’s Global Chief Technology Officer, I am part of Intraway’s Executive Leadership Team, Board, and a founding member. As a technology leader, I lead the Product, Development, and Architecture initiatives within the company. My contributions have played a major role in the growth of Intraway, increasing the company’s prominence in the industry and ensuring that the entire organization is aligned with the latest technology trends.
Supporting the service of over 40 million subscribers in more than 20 countries over three continents, Intraway’s mission-critical solutions help global telecommunications operators create the network of the future, today. By unleashing the full potential of networks, Intraway’s standards-based codeless provisioning automation solutions add the latest, cutting-edge functionalities to speed up time-to-market, reduce operational costs, and advance customer-centricity.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?Instead of reinventing the wheel and spending our time and energy analyzing and designing our own APIs, we want to take full advantage of the effort that TM Forum already put into the Open API project since it is more cost-effective.
It is also truly beneficial to have the
Open API community forum where you can post questions related to the particular usage of the APIs and you always get your questions answered.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? TMF641 Service Ordering API, TMF 638 Service Inventory Management API and TMF 633 Service Catalog API.
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs? A couple of years ago we went to the effort of building a cloud-native service activation platform. The three key components that we needed for this endeavor were a service order management capability, a service catalog and a service inventory. As we were trying to define our own APIs, we decided to select and implement TM Forum APIs because we were trying to achieve flexibility. At the same time, we wanted to offer our customer a solution that wasn't just another 'black box', but an open solution based on standards.
How do you use the APIs?Our company focuses on fulfillment and activation of communication services. The service ordering API is the main point of entry whenever an activation process needs to take place. The service catalog API serves to validate the services specification in the catalog and other customer-facing services dependencies. Finally, the service inventory API will allow us to persist the service-resource relationship associated with the party since our solution has to be stateful in order to provide maximum benefits to our clients and to simplify advanced use cases.
Where do you use them?Tigo-Millicom (Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Honduras). WOW! (USA). Telecom (Argentina). IZZI Telecom (Mexico). Digital TV (Bolivia). Telecable (Costa Rica).
Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?We use TM Forum APIs in conjunction with our own APIs with no problems or overlapping between the two of them. We are planning on incorporating MEF APIs in the future.
How have you benefited from using these APIs?The onboarding of new customers to our API is much faster because Open APIs are well documented on the
Open API portal. The APIs can handle any digital service we would like to activate using our platform, so there is no need for any additional custom APIs to manage the list of use cases from our customers.
The feedback we have is that integration using TM Forum Open APIs is simple and easy to follow for any service and use case we need to implement across the multiple technologies out there.
To read more stories of how our members are using TM Forum Open APIs, visit: https://www.tmforum.org/my-api-story/. To learn more about TM Forum Open APIs visit www.tmforum.org/open-apis
